This much we know

Just an annoying little media trope

This interesting piece about child abandonment in the Guardian represents a lot of good news. It was just irritating to run into a silly trope halfway through the piece.

After discussing a recent case, the author takes a broader view and says:

Child abandonment was once a blight on society – when the Foundling hospital was built by Thomas Coram in the 18th century, about 1,000 babies a year were abandoned in London alone, the victims of parental poverty and oppressive social mores. But it is now vanishingly rare.

Access to contraception, changing societal attitudes to babies born out of wedlock, and the rise of the welfare state have caused the change.

A 2009 study by Sherr and colleagues, based on press reports from 1998-2005, estimated about 16 recently born babies were abandoned in the UK each year, the majority newborn.

Which is great, isn’t it? I mean, that’s still 16 whole human beings, but the dramatic drop does mean that something is being done right. And that middle paragraph seems to nail what it is pretty well. This is the kind of stuff that leftie me lives for. Our developed country social democratic lifestyle really does help people, and this statistic offers us a way to demonstrate that in the data.

And yet, the very next paragraph in the story starts with this line:

Very little is known about what drives parents to abandon their babies.

Wait, we know *exactly* what drives 99% of parents to abandon children. You just listed them out: lack of contraception, social condemnation of children born out of wedlock, and poverty. You can’t expunge that hard-won knowledge because you want to add a patina of mystery to this article!

Now, I know the author is actually talking about the remaining, vanishingly rare cases. But is there really much mystery here? It’s going to be some toxic combination of mental illness, poverty, and lingering social condemnation. When we’re talking these small numbers, each case will be highly idiosyncratic, and it may not be helpful to try to generalise about these last few cases at all. But there are really powerful generalisations to be made about the 99% of abandonment that we’ve already stopped, generalisations that remind us to keep developing the economy and keep supporting underprivileged people.

Anyway, it’s still a good article, despite that little bit of irritating journalese.